It was an idle weekend morning, and I was puttering around the kitchen. Everything suggested domestic tranquility: husband and son laughing softly at the table, daughters playing quietly at the counter, puppy peaceably destroying a cloth. In fact, I was like a “Looney Tunes” character that is about to be hit by an anvil and has no idea what’s coming. “Oh, awful,” said my husband, recoiling.
“I know, right?” said my son. He came over to me and held out a cell phone — mine, as it happened.
“Look what I did to Daddy!” Having downloaded a special effects app, he had taken a snapshot of his father and overlaid it with a pair of giant red lips and blue comic-book eyes. He touched the screen and that image was replaced by another of my husband wearing a feathered Mardi Gras mask.
“Ugh,” I said amiably, as the anvil dropped silently toward me.
“Let me take a picture of you,” said the boy.
“No way,” I said, putting up my hand and turning my head.
“Got you anyway,” he said, but pancakes were ready and I didn’t think anything more about it.
We all had breakfast, and as the family was getting ready to leave the house my son approached me again. This time he was brimming with secret glee.
“How do you like this?” he asked, showing me a truly horrible pre-caffeine, pre-breakfast portrait of my unwashed self with giant chartreuse ears and some kind of mustache.
“Erase that this instant,” I said, laughing. “Can you imagine if anyone saw it? I’d die.”
The boy’s smile broadened. My smile faded.
“I sent it to all your contacts.”
“You what?”
“I sent this picture to all your contacts. On your phone.”
BANG! The anvil hit, and everything seemed to explode around me.
“You didn’t,” I said faintly, through the concussion.
“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “Don’t worry, Mummy, it’s just a joke. It’s funny.”
My husband had joined us and, incredibly, seemed to be smiling — until he caught sight of my ashen face.
“You didn’t,” he said to the boy, confirming rather than asking.
My son began to look worried. “It’s just a joke,” he repeated.
“A joke?” I cried, overcome with horror and outrage. “You sent that horrible picture to my friends, and editors and colleagues? You sent it to the principal of your school? And you make it look like it came from me because you used my phone?”
And though it may surprise you, I was a little bit sympathetic in my distress. How confusing it must be for children growing up in this unbounded, snark-filled, wireless world not only to appreciate that there are still lots of boundaries they mustn’t cross but also where they might encounter them. Even if our parents take great pains to instruct us, the fact is that when we are young and foolish, we are young and foolish. He was young, and he’d done something foolish.
With shaking fingers, I scrolled to the “sent” box on my phone. And there I saw it: There was the email with that horrible picture, going to 54 contacts. Yet it hadn’t gone. Its dispatch to 53 people had been stalled by a single nonfunctioning email address.
The gods of technology, bless them, had spared me.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column
appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@ washingtonexaminer.com.
